My research advances a sequencing perspective on entrepreneurial development: founders exercise discretion over when strategic activities occur relative to one another, and this sequencing is a source of performance heterogeneity

Working Papers

Strategic Delay

Job Market Paper

Strategic Delay examines whether founders exercise discretion over when to accept venture capital and the relationship between the timing of entry and venture development. I introduce a risk-adjusted measure of delay. Startups that appear to delay strategically seem to enter venture capital in a more developed state, engage in less post-financing repositioning, and face a tradeoff between exit quality and acquisition likelihood.

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Manuscript available on request.

Product–Market Fit and the Sequencing of Customer versus Investor Validation

Working Paper

Manuscript available on request.

Abstract

Product–market fit is widely viewed as a defining milestone for startups. Before product–market fit, startups face substantial uncertainty about customer needs, product design, and whether the proposed product creates value for a specific customer segment. After product–market fit, startups can begin shifting from search toward growth. To resolve this uncertainty, entrepreneurs engage in iterative learning before scale-up. Yet, high-growth startups often raise venture capital before product–market uncertainty has been resolved. Despite the prevalence of this sequence, there is limited understanding about how product–market search relates to the sequencing of customer and investor validation. Does obtaining venture capital before customer validation matter for the path to product–market fit? I examine this question by studying the temporal ordering of product–market fit and first venture capital financing. I conceptualize product–market fit as a customer-validated learning milestone and develop a scalable measure using longitudinal enterprise customer-user reviews from a proprietary, global business software review platform. Linking these data to firm-level information on first VC timing and strategic delay among U.S.-headquartered, single-product startups founded between 2010 and 2024, I show that validation sequence is associated with the duration of product–market search. Among firms that attain product–market fit, startups that raise venture capital before product–market fit remain in product–market search substantially longer—approximately three additional years—relative to firms that validate customers before venture financing. I further show that strategic-delay firms are significantly more likely to reach product–market fit before, or in the same year as, first venture capital financing. These results are robust to multiple specifications and alternative definitions of product–market fit attainment. The findings suggest that while venture capital can accelerate development, it may also change the conditions under which iterative learning proceeds; conversely, discretion over the timing of venture capital entry may allow customer validation to occur before external financing. By bringing customer validation and investor validation into the same temporal frame, the paper shows that startup development depends not only on whether ventures learn under uncertainty, but also on when external capital enters relative to the validation of that learning.

Works in Progress

Artificial Intelligence, Customer Feedback and the Changing Speed of Product–Market Learning

Analysis in progress.

Organizational Design, Product–Market Fit, and Entrepreneurial Performance

Data collection complete.